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Pass the Microphone, If You Can Get Inside

AROUND 11 on a Sunday night last month, Sebastian Nicolas, karaoke impresario, leaned back on his banquette at Cipriani Downtown and ticked away at his BlackBerry. The room was empty, save a gaggle of stunning waitresses -- one of them dressed as a Santa's helper -- and in the final moments of calm before his party started, Mr. Nicolas had to take care of some last communiqués. He checked on the Boca Juniors, an Argentinian soccer team, his favorite; they'd won. He zapped word to a few friends that the party was starting. Good news: they were on the way. Then he took a sip of Champagne and looked around the room intently, the way a painter might gaze at a blank canvas.

"It's all about balance," Mr. Nicolas said with the utmost earnestness. "If there are too many girls, we let in more guys. We don't want that many suits. It's glamorous, but we emphasize the artsy. Whoever is in town is here: Leo, Denzel, Jennifer Lopez, everybody."

If the prospect of playing host to everybody was unnerving to him, the karaoke impresario wasn't letting on.

"After a while you lose the star-struck attitude," Mr. Nicolas said. And there was something else: "I'm good at this."

Using an entirely superficial set of metrics, it is hard to find fault with that claim. In his first time out as a promoter Mr. Nicolas, who grew up in Chile and Sweden and graduated from Columbia University, has put together one of the more exclusive weekly parties in Manhattan, his Sunday night karaoke sing-out at Cipriani Downtown.

It's a gathering at which the gorgeous, the wealthy and the accomplished -- and, oh yes, hangers-on aplenty -- mingle, lounge and make out amid a steady flow of vodka and an often terribly off-key vocal soundtrack. On the Sunday before Christmas, the Ralph Lauren model Valentina Zelyaeva swayed willowlike in the center of the room. Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers sat impassively on a banquet. Harvey Weinstein and Damon Dash prowled the floor, looking somewhat lost. A clutch of stunning young beauties shared the mike and sang: "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me? Don't you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?" (Later they moved on to a slightly overzealous version of "I Touch Myself.")

"This is as good as it gets," said the photographer Peter Beard, surveying the room -- and the girls -- from the bar. He gestured at the reed roof and exposed timbers overhead. "It reminds me of the Serengeti," he said. It was suggested to Mr. Beard that there were more beautiful women per square foot at the karaoke party than anywhere on the Serengeti.

"You should meet my girlfriend!" he roared. "She's a dancer."

Every season in New York has its model party, a mash-up of extraordinarily beautiful young women and the older men with black Amex cards who seek their company. These days Mr. Nicolas's karaoke party is that event. And yet exactly how it is that Mr. Nicolas, a soft-spoken 26-year-old non-New Yorker, came to preside over one of the more happening scenes in town -- one that routinely attracts people who've been established in the city longer than Mr. Nicolas has been alive -- may seem at first a mystery.

As the party thumped around him, Mr. Nicolas took a sip of Amstel Light and explained how it worked.

"This is a young man's business," he said. "The girls, they're 19 to 23. If I can relate to them better, I'm in a much better position to be friends. Otherwise it feels unnatural."

"I'm a guy who has access to the top models," he added. "And that's a big thing in night life." Mr. Nicolas said he arrived in New York six years ago with no particular advantages. His English was poor, he said. (He still speaks with a thick accent.) He wasn't particularly wealthy; his parents fled the Pinochet regime in Chile and settled in Sweden. (His father is an economist there; his mother, an anthropologist who now lives and works on Easter Island.) But he did have a sister named Monse, who was a model, and Mr. Nicolas soon met and dated some of her friends.

"It was more like a bridge into that world," Mr. Nicolas said. "I never took it seriously. It was just, 'Wow, I'm hooking up.' " With his international background and his language skills -- Mr. Nicolas spoke Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese, and his English was rapidly improving -- he was a perfect guide for young foreign models settling into New York.

He became close with an international crowd of models including Gemma Ward, Caroline Winberg and Petra Nemcova. Whenever possible he gave parties for them. He helped organize an out-of-control birthday party at a bar on the Lower East Side for Ms. Ward, and helped Ms. Nemcova, who survived the Asian tsunami, plan a benefit that raised nearly $800,000.

Mr. Nicolas said it all suited his temperament perfectly. "I like hot girls," he said.

One person who felt he could use Mr. Nicolas's connections was Giuseppe Cipriani, who runs Cipriani Restaurants. Mr. Cipriani had opened a membership lounge in a cozy space with a fireplace and sofas above Cipriani Downtown, his SoHo restaurant that is a haven for Europeans for whom a two-hour lunch is as routine as a plain slice for most other New Yorkers. Two hundred fifty invited members pay around $2,500 a year for entrée into the lounge, which also draws celebrities; the routine for many is to have dinner downstairs and then move on to the party in the private club above.

When Sean Combs arrives, it is said, he simply points to the table where he'd like to sit, and if those less famous are sitting there, they are obliged to scatter. With the steep membership fee comes an implicit promise: the crowd, and especially the babes, will be smoking hot.

Mr. Nicolas seems to have had little trouble persuading Mr. Cipriani to give him the lounge on Sunday nights, when it was normally closed, to see what kind of scene he could create. It was the promoter equivalent of an unknown comedian getting a gig on David Letterman.

There was something special, too, about Sunday night; it is the preferred night out for people who have nowhere in particular to be on Monday morning: promoters, models, celebrities and the lassitudinously rich.

On this Sunday, Mr. Kiedis, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, strolled in alone, spotted a model friend, Jessica Stam; the two nuzzled on a sofa for a while, and in no time they were gone. The celebrity crowd can create the potential for awkward moments as well. Only moments after Mr. Kiedis departed, the D.J. cued up "Under the Bridge," the Chili Peppers tune, which was promptly mangled by a guest.

Mr. Nicolas said his epiphany came last March when he decided to use the Sunday night party to have a birthday celebration for Ms. Winberg, and to bring a karaoke machine. He rejected hip-hop, the preferred soundtrack in most clubs these days, in favor of old-fashioned rock 'n' roll: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Nirvana and Bon Jovi.

For his young crowd there is nostalgia about all those old bands, Mr. Nicolas said, which gave his guests something to bond over. Midway through the party Mr. Nicolas realized it was working.

"Who doesn't like to be a rock star?" he said. "And besides, it's fun to watch people make fools of themselves."

Mr. Nicolas has honed his methods. Rather than having a stage, he circulates several microphones in the crowd, so that it's often hard to tell who is singing. "Having more than one mike makes people more comfortable because if it's bad, they can blame the other person," he said. He likes his scene "messy," he said, with people strewn about on the sofas and stretching over one another to pass microphones and to reach for the bottles of vodka on the tables. To an outsider the evening looks like a cross between a beer commercial and a crazed high school party in the basement of some kid whose parents are out of town.

"It's really, really 'house party,' " Mr. Nicolas said.

A man at the bar who declined to give his name, for fear of alerting his bosses and clients that he was out past 1 a.m. on a Sunday, described the crowd this way: